After successfully completing our little test drive of our car without any trouble, it was time to start our journey. For our road trip we had decided to start in the south and make our way north as Amanda's plane ticket home was leaving from Auckland (it made no difference to me as I hadn't purchased my exit ticket). Amanda and I are a little old school. We both hate technology and neither of us owned a very reliable smartphone (Amanda tends to lose things, a lot), so we bought maps. Yes, those old paper map things, and they were awesome! The drive from Queenstown to Bluff is about 217km, so a relatively short drive to start. We really wanted to check out a cool signpost but we were unlucky that day. There was the Oyster Festival but a pretty bad storm hit the town so the festival was shut down early. Apparently about 5,000 people showed up to the festival to eat 30,000 oysters! What?! The hail storm caused a major car accident which ended up entangled in fallen power lines. Traffic was backed up and some people got stranded in Bluff overnight.
Having had our fair share of oysters for dinner (they were famous Bluff
oysters after all), and trying to escape the wooing of an old drunken
man, we headed outside to look for another place to hang out and kill
some time.
We stumbled into a café which we thought was open, but actually
wasn't. They were having a private party and they invited us to join them. They wined and dined us and
offered their driveway as our campground for the night as they had a full
house. I'm pretty sure I haven't met nicer people anywhere else. We had met a couple at the party who lives in Dunedin, they offered us their spare room for a few nights once we got to that city. Talk about hospitality! I seriously love this country.
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| Mac & Sue own The Lighthouse Gallery and café |
We were pretty
cozy in our new sleeping bags, but it was a mighty windy night; the car shook
from side to side and the rain turned into hail, it was freezing. Thankfully I didn't have to pee in the middle of the night like Amanda did. It was probably the most strategic pee of her life. She had to time is just right, go outside when the wind was "calm" and pee next to a tree as fast as she could. We definitely had a laugh about it. These are things we didn't think of before starting our journey.
The next morning wasn’t
looking much better and our breakfast date with the café owners, Mac and Sue, turned into an
all-day affair and before we knew it, they had invited us to stay the night
indoors as their previous guests had left and space was now available. We
happily accepted their offer.
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| These houses have amazing views. |
The weather
forecast was wrong about Monday and it was a beautiful day. We thought we would
get a head start, but when we hopped into our car it wouldn’t start; dead battery.
After a few trials of no-luck jumps from neighbours, it finally started after
another try a couple of hours later. In the meantime, we had decided to take a
walk down to Stirling Point to look at that signpost we had come to see. If
ever you need to get stranded – do get stuck in Bluff as the people are super
friendly and very hospitable. It was a great start to our road trip.
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| Sterling Point |
We enjoyed getting to know Mac, Sue and their visiting granddaughter Alexandra (from Maryland) while we stayed with them. They gave us some good travel tips and some places to see that were not on our list before. You can learn a lot from locals.Now that we had seen the signpost and our car had finally started, it was time to head towards Dunedin via The Catlins.
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